Samantha Nock, A Family of Dreamers

 

fort st. john,

i remember when there used to be nothing
but flat fields in front of my elementary school.

behind kokum’s house,
i play pretend in the backyard.
climb on the railing of the porch and talk to
the ravens.

ki miyokîsikan’sin, babe?

The full-length debut from Vancouver-based Samantha Nock is A Family of Dreamers (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023), a collection of first-person lyrics that exist as an assemblage of monologues or gestures around a landscape of family, ancestors and the land itself, writing her origins in rural north-east British Columbia. “we carry the grief of our ancestors.” she writes, to open the poem “follow your traplines home,” “while we carry / our mothers’ grief / our aunties’ grief / and the grief of the old woman / we saw in shoppers.” Nock’s poems sit as elegies and acknowledgments, offering presence and prayer, writing of mothers and grandmothers and even herself with enormous care. Nock’s poems offer linkages to the past, and the growing pains of finding herself amid these complexities of a living history, as well as northern British Columbia dive bars, “northern cuzzins” and anti-Indigenous racism. This is a deeply intimate collection that seeks to find and hold one’s place, both as an individual and within a context far larger and longer than herself. “hold the braid like this,” she writes, to open the poem “ceremony,” “here, use this to light it. // we’re not supposed to use a lighter? / shit, just use it anyways. / is it going? // okay. // you rub your hands together like this? / push the smoke down your body.”